The Unwanted Wendigo [ManxMan]

Chapter Ten: Tale as Old as Time

[WARNING: This chapter contains a brief non-con/dub-con kissing scene. If this bothers you, stop reading at "Come here" and start again at the next skip marker.]

~Chapter Ten: Tale as Old as Time~

Many years ago, my father told me something that has stuck with me since. "Son, you will hear many men called monsters for their deeds. Some of them may even look it, too, but it is not the sins a man commits or the deeds he does that makes a monster; it is what he forgets in the process. The moment a man forgets who he is and who he set out to be in his pursuit of something is when he loses his humanity. And that, Lancelot, is what creates a monster."

And he wasn't wrong.

Plenty of people have asked me how I became a wendigo. After all, it is not something one is born into. Wendigo cannot and have never been born; that is just not how it is. So, when someone inevitably asks, I blame it on teenage boredom or a bad meal served by questionable folk, and sometimes, if someone really gets under my skin, I claim it was alien experimentation. Of course, no one ever believes me when I say those things, as a wendigo is only a wendigo when it is made by greed and cannibalism, right?

Wrong...well, half wrong, anyway.

The only person I have ever gotten close to telling the real story to is Atasah, but I eventually just settled on the vaguest truth I could give:

"I set out on an adventure and got lost along the way."

- - - - - - -

My story started in the mid-1860s with a brown-haired, blue-eyed Southern boy named Lancelot. It was an unpleasant time to be alive, as the American Civil War had only just ended and the country was still fighting with itself. But despite all the strife, he was born into a well-off family in a small town and had little to worry about outside the occasional lawless criminal passing through.

Lancelot – known as Lance to his friends – was a very studious child, timid compared to the other boys his age. His family could rarely afford books, expensive as they were back then following the Civil War, but he still found ways to read, which usually involved performing menial tasks for the town's priest. He often returned home covered in dust, but with a new book the priest let him borrow.

Most of the books were historical or religious things related to the Bible, but sometimes he would be lucky enough to be given stories about princes and princesses, monsters and adventures. They were few and far between, but they still left him with a yearning for an adventure of his own. However, in a town as small as his, located in the middle of nowhere, there were not a lot of adventures to be had.

So, one day, on his eighteenth birthday, he, like a fool, ran away from his family obligations to star in his own adventure. Lance fully intended to return eventually, expecting to be gone no more than a few months. However, few things went as planned for the boy with his head in the clouds; he just failed to notice it until it was too late.

The first problem he came across was a lack of water a week into his adventure. It was hot during his travels through a deserted, dry landscape, and he rationed his water poorly, not knowing any better. He lost his travel pack the day after he ran out of water when he encountered a hungry coyote that chased him until he dropped it. With his loss of the pack, he lost his food, his blankets, and his change of clothes.

He still had his compass, though, as it had been in his pocket the whole time. He thought he could use it to find his way home for sure.

But if it really had been that easy, I would not still be alive.